Multimedia is information that is provided in an audio and/or video format. Gains in accessibility for the presentation of multimedia have been extremely slow, and have proven to be fairly costly. If measures are taken towards accessibility when first creating the multimedia work, much back-tracking and some of the expenses associated with it are avoided. The important thing to remember with multimedia is that accessibility efforts are in their first stages. When you are buying audio/video material for your classes or Web site, you might try looking for materials that have already been made accessible.
Audio for the Deaf
Deaf people need a text transcript or some other alternative form of an audio presentation. Often the amount of time and cost put into making a transcript is extensive. At this point, the only thing to do is to have someone type out the transcripts of audio on an as-needed basis or have someone sign (sign language) the content to the deaf person. There is no quick and easy method to provide text equivalents for audio and video.
In general, you will need to provide alternative forms of the audio to someone who is deaf.
Video for the Blind
We've all seen movies with sound on the Internet. The blind can hear the audio, but they miss the visual clues. We often communicate visually, but this is lost to the blind. These lost visual clues must somehow be communicated to the blind person listening to the sound track of a movie. This might be accomplished by adding a second sound track to the movie where someone is explaining what is taking place visually. Video accessibility for the blind is still relatively new, and preparing video for accessibility is time consuming and costly.
In general, you will need to provide alternative forms of the visual aspect of the video to someone who is blind.
Plug-ins
Multimedia comes in different formats like Quick Time, RealPlayer, Flash, Shockwave, etc. In order to view the multimedia, you will need the "plug-in" (player) for each of the different formats. You will need to provide your audience with a link to the site where they can download the plug-in. Here are two examples of links to plug-ins. The images are not necessary, but they do catch your eye. You can download plug-in images from the place you are linking to.
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Captioning: Editing Video for the Net
Very few novice Web developers know how to edit QuickTime and RealPlayer movies for the Net. In fact, it's quite complicated for someone just starting out; however, there are programs that will assist you in adding audio and/or text captioning to video. The process is quite time consuming and costly. At this time it is probably more expedient to seek out videos with captioning already in the movie. If you are interested in learning more about software that allows you to caption your own video, you can read about a program called MAGpie. There are other applications that can add captions to movies, too, but we will use MAGpie as our example.
MAGpie is an authoring tool that can help you add captioning to a multimedia presentation. Follow the link for a free download of MAGpie. On the University of Indiana site, there is a good example provided by the Adaptive Technology Center. This film will show a short presentation that has been produced using MAGpie: http://www.indiana.edu/~iuadapts/. The following is a screen shot detailing how the transcription works and what the audio/video/transcript layout looks like from the ATC at Indiana University:
This video screen shot an example of what an accessible video looks like. A deaf person could read the transcript on the screen as they watch the movie. A blind person could hear the audio, but not see the action. The action or events would have to be described aurally in a second audio track or by some other means, possibly a text transcript that they could listen to with their screen reader.
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